An application server environment can present complex monitoring challenges including identifying possible occurrences of performance problems and knowing the appropriate parameter or parameters to modify to improve performance. Such monitoring typically relies heavily on the administrator having a complete knowledge of all of the components in the entire topology, as well as the vast amount of information collected for each runtime environment, and the relationships between the various components to be able, to confidently identify and fix problems.
However, current approaches for diagnosing performance problems within an application server, cannot be standardized and automated across various containers within the server, and are of little use in determining a root cause of a problem. These are the general areas that embodiments of the invention are intended to address.